On Nov 7, 7:14 am, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:>>>> But that is the trouble with memetics: it says absolutely nothing
>>>> about human and social development. It has no predictive qualities and
>>>> provides no insights into human society. All it says is that ideas
>>>> grow if they reproduce. Well ha-fucking-ha - so fucking what? If memes
>>>> (a typically pseudo-scientific socially constructed piece of dog-poo,
>>>> no better than evolutionary psychology) result is social failure as
>>>> well as social success then why have the concept at all?
>>>> The real challenge is not to call human ideas and social strategies
>>>> memes, but to look carefully at the contextual and contingent
>>>> qualities human action and change and to understand them for what they
>>>> are. Memes don't really exist in any meaningful way and add absolutely
>>>> fuck all to our understanding of human history and social change.-
>
>>> Isn't a meme just a word that means a process by which ideas spread
>>> and change through a population and the influence of these upon social
>>> relationships? What argument do you have against evolutionary
>>> psychology besides signs of disliking in an artistic sense? Do you
>>> turn "trends" "styles" etc..., into oxymorons also, and aren't they
>>> similar processes to memes
>
>> Evolutionary psychology (EPsycho)is socially constructed
>> pseudoscience. It works like this:
>> Take a trait, any trait.
>> Now, look at the trait!
>> Is the trait good or bad?
>> If good then invent some plausable story about man's evolutionary past
>> (usually his hunter. gatherer stage) and then attribute the trait to
>> that story.
>> If the trait is bad then invent some counter argument that suggests
>> that while the trait WAS good in some evolutionary past its no good
>> now becasue humans don't do stuff like that anymore.
>> There is no attempt to verify any of this, as the object of their
>> study is lost in the past. What it does is to bolster evolution with
>> imaginary teleogical inventions which evolutionary theory does not
>> need.
>
> This sounds more like a description of the problems that social and
> psychological sciences face generally when compared with more clear
> cut cases of the physical sciences. Actually liberals have begun to
> embrace evolutionary psychology, which was strange to me at first, (i
> am a liberal moderate)
The problem is that the object of study in social "science" a
completely socially constructed both both by the society that
reproduces them and necessarily by the "discipline" of sociology
itself. It should not pretend to offer explanations of the type we
find in physics or chemistry.
Becasue of the "constructivity" of the objects there can be no basis
for any kind of induction. General laws, common in "pure" science are
problematic enough and rely on habitual observation acording to Hume.
In social science such laws are soon swept aside by a new generation
of style and fashion. Even when we identify the "general" in social
contexts, we can no more attribute it to a purpose than we can
"Brownian motion".
>
> Just so stories are what Sherlock Holmes might have been accused of.
> But if you want to use evolutionary psychology as an example of this
> distortability I think you explain better explains the media news,
> especially the part about "retraction" after the facts have been found
> to be otherwise. I doubt if in social science the silence would be as
> tolerated as it is in the fast paced media. Researchers in
> evolutionary psychology are generally practicing research at
> universities and the accountability is a bit more strict than in
> common opinions such as yours above. Actually your analysis is a just
> so straw man story which doesn't make its case very well at all.
>
> One should remember that in the middle ages most hard physical science
> too was made up of just so stories.
>
>> The latest offering attempts to explain pink for girls and blues for
>> boys due to hunter/gatherer practice. It argues that girls go for pink
>> becasue they are evolved to look for red berries whilst the guys go
>> out and hunt.
>> There are serious problems with this. First is the usual false sexual
>> dichotomy man the hunter, woman the gatherer which has been
>> effectively destroyed by antrolopogists decades ago.
>
> Can you support your argument that it was destrioyed and that you have
> not been just cherry picking sources that will support your "blank
> slate" no human instincts or drives bias, all along? How would you
> conclusively show that men and women have identical brain and there is
> no effect on the brain by gender dimorphism. I respect your opinion
> but if you have been presenting your opinions with this kind of
> rhetoric to your students shame on you.
>
>> The second is
>> that the E Psycho boys and girls have failed to recognise that
>> pink=girl, blue=boy is a VERY recent thing. Less than 80 years in
>> fact. Before the 1930s pink was a boy's colour, the recomended colour
>> for girls was pale green or pale blue.
>
> This assumes that any instinct or emotional biases that we have cannot
> be overriden by learning. Clearly instincts are adjustable in strength
> during critical stages of development. Unless you can reproduce the
> study you referred to please see if you can discount this editorial
> slant on that research.
>
> Sex, shopping and thinking pink
> Aug 23rd 2007
>
>>From The Economist print edition
>
> The brains of men and women are, indeed, different
>
> WOMEN really are better than men at shopping. And they really do
> prefer pink. And, surprisingly, it is possible that these facts are
> connected. The first conclusion was drawn by Joshua New of Yale
> University and his colleagues. The second was drawn by Anya Hurlbert
> and Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University in England. The connecting
> theme is that in the division of labour that forms the primordial
> bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies, it is the men who do the
> hunting and the women who do the gathering.
>
> Blackberry-picking aside, urban humanity does little gathering from
> the wild these days, so Dr New decided to look at what seemed to him
> to be the nearest equivalent-shopping at a farmers' market. There is a
> fair amount of evidence that men are better than women at solving
> certain sorts of spatial problems, such as remembering the locations
> of topographical landmarks. Many researchers suggest such skills may
> have been important in the past for man-the-hunter, who needed to be
> able to find his way round the landscape. If that is the case, then
> woman-the-gatherer might have been expected to develop complementary
> skills not shown by males. And that, as he writes in this week's
> Proceedings of the Royal Society, is what Dr New found.
>
> Dr New used the market to test two hypotheses. The first was that
> women remember the locations of food resources more accurately than
> men do. The second was that the more nutritionally valuable a resource
> is, the more accurately its location will be remembered.
>
> To prove these conjectures he recruited 41 women and 45 men and led
> each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market.
> In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of
> the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls,
> participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their
> preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in
> normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they
> had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six
> stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point
> toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In
> addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.
>
> In the pink
> On average, women were 9
